14 Summers
I am in the midst of my fourteenth summer on Squirrel Island. This makes me a relative newcomer; Ari has spent every one of his 32 summers here, and most families can count the generations who have summered on this tiny Maine island. Still, I have enough history here to have transformed several times.
The first year I was here for just a week, unsure of my claim to the boy who brought me or to the Island itself. But the next year we spent the whole summer together, and I proved my legitimacy by working at the Tea Shop, the little lunch place that is the Island’s only commercial enterprise. Even now, if I sense I’m being dismissed as an outsider, I mention, “when I worked at the Tea Shop…” and watch the faces soften into acceptance.
For years, Squirrel Island was a place of indulgence. We stayed up late, drinking on the rocks and counting shooting stars, stumbling into the cottage to make cookies at 2 am, then falling asleep to the sound of the waves just beyond our window. We woke only when the smell of warm blueberry muffins lured us downstairs, and we found cappuccinos made just for us waiting on the porch. Our days were filled with swimming off the SIBA dock, picnicking on Cunner Point, reading in the hammock, and smoking bowls in so many secret places that the Island sometimes feels like a map of places we did things we weren’t supposed to do.
I was a college kid, a young adult, and a girlfriend on Squirrel Island. Ari slipped a diamond ring onto my finger under the stars on the South Shore, and I became a Squirrel Island bride. Through it all, I walked barefoot on the rough sidewalks, made from a century-old recipe that includes helpings of sea glass and sand, and I soaked up the magic of this place. There are fairy houses and wildflowers and the sweetest raspberries you’ve ever tasted. There are no cars or businesses here, no responsibilities or obligations.
Except that now there are. Now I am a Squirrel Island mother, responsible for all of the needs of my two children, and also a Squirrel Island daughter-in-law, worrying about my ailing mother-in-law and struggling father-in-law. Now being here is harder, in many ways, than being at home. It’s hard to maintain the routines so crucial to our daily life, hard to share space with three generations of extended family, and hard to accept the loss of what Squirrel Island used to be to me. I don’t read much here, I don’t get out on the rocks at night, I wake to the cries of my baby, not the smell of muffins, and I haven’t smoked a bowl in more than four years.
It is a loss, and I feel it deeply. But the hole it leaves is being filled with a different kind of magic. Because my children love it here. At three and a half, Tessa has enough memory of her summers on Squirrel Island that she talks about it all winter long. She thinks about the Cove and the Fairy Forest and ordering her own ice cream at the Tea Shop. She looks forward to going barefoot everywhere and to picking blueberries with her Poppy. She sorts her sea glass and plans on collecting more. And when she’s here, she is in heaven.
Squirrel Island is a magical place to be a child. It is a safe place, a wild and exciting place where children are free to explore and dream and breathe in a different world. My life on Squirrel Island started when I was 18, but now I get to experience what it’s like to be three here. Now, when I pick raspberries and blackberries, I don’t even want to eat them; I would much rather tell Tessa to close her eyes and open her mouth, and watch the joy spread across her face as she tastes them. Now I get to listen to the stories she tells her baby brother, stories about the things she did when she was a baby on Squirrel Island, and the things their Daddy did when he was little on Squirrel Island. Now I get to give this place and this feeling and this indulgence to Tessa and Calder. And I am lucky, and grateful.
Life changes so incrementally at home. Here, where I can line up my fourteen summers, it’s easier to read the balance sheet of losses and gains. It’s easier to see that the trades never come out evenly, because they are completely different. And it’s the surprise of those differences that makes the losses bearable, and the gains so sweet.
What about you? What place prompts you to think about the trade-offs that come with motherhood? Where do you come down on the balance?
4 comments
The whole time I have summered on an island it has been as a mother. We started coming here when my husband built us a house when my daughters were five and 8. He had spent summers as a child on a lake in Wisconsin and he wanted something like that for his children (He explains that an island is an inside out lake.) We brought our son out here when he was a week old and his sisters were 9 and 6. That summer we had to put an addition on our porch to put in a bigger washing machine and dryer. For me summers here have always been about the work of making sure there was enough food, dry towels and clean dishes. Always about cooking and cleaning and entertaining others. Always about waiting for moments of quiet. Then there were the horrifying summers when the girls were teenagers and stayed in town and got into trouble. This summer my son is eighteen and is working on an other island. He gets in his little outboard every morning and I watch him head out as I sit with my tea on the porch. After a long sit I get up and go for a swim. I love to swim in August when the ocean has warmed just enough to make it easier to stay in.
Mothering is a lot of hard work. The hardest work I have ever done. It is harder on an island in some ways but I have always looked forward to it. This summer my daughter and her fiance came for a long week end and cooked me breakfast and made us all a really good meal, they helped us split and stack wood. She is 27. It was wonderful.
I still have tears on my checks as I write this. I am honored to be one of the first, of many to come, readers of this beautiful blog.
I too spent summers on an island. An island to the east of yours called Vinalhaven. I too have “many secret places (where)… we did things we weren’t supposed to do”. I miss those days and know I can never have them again. But just Friday, while at the beach with you, I watched a group of seven girls who were their own little self-designed camp, each with their own colored bucket and roaming around Kettle Cove like they owned it. I felt happy knowing that our daughters will grow up Maine girls and will hopefully be “bad” in the same, relatively safe ways we experienced when we were teenagers and maybe, just maybe, we can live vicariously through their experiences.
Thank you for writing. Your voice must be heard and shared. Thank you for sharing it with me.
My Cream-Colored Escape
To look at the rocker in “the girl’s” room earns nothing more than a glance in the light of day. It is uneven and off-white in color, and as its current but not original owners we remain unsure of whether this was per-design or due to hours of previous human exposure. When tipped to its extreme it is most certainly a risk in safety, and it spins around at alarming speeds for a decades-old chair. The ottoman that sits obediently at its face wants desperately to match, but dressed in different cloth and aged in a different shade, it is not fooling anyone.
At night, though, the mottled color and presence of this chair takes on an entirely different existence. At night, this rocker that comforted my grandmother for decades, this rocker that comforted my grandfather that has since left our precious earth, this rocker that soothed the cries of my first born, soothed the cries of my second born, and most has certainly absorbed more than its fair share of my own tears, this rocker is magical.
And today my hours in this chair seem to be whittling. My second and, barring extreme circumstance, last baby is weening off the breast. I am forced to realize the independence of a baby once entirely dependent on me, while admittedly celebrating the independence that it brings to self. Such a mix of emotion, such a challenge of nature. I am unsure of whether to smile and have a drink or shed a tear for my loss. To celebrate the regain of my physical body or to mourn the transformation of what morphed it in the first place.
Perhaps now my cream-colored escape will soothe yet another existence… that of a mother and her own need for understanding what independence means.
I believe most parents would agree that the word “balance” swiftly vacated their vocabulary and their lives the moment their first child was born. (They don’t call them “dependents” for nothing!) And should one have been mad enough to procreate more than once, well…fool me twice–or three times or four times—shame on me!
What is it, exactly, that we seek to balance anyway? Can we actually believe that there is hope for more than a few moments of solitude beyond the mere seconds we have in the bathroom or for some quality time spent one-on-one with our partner? HA! It’s called hiring a nanny.
Didn’t all of us thoughtful wanna-be-parents contemplate the sacrifice that is innately a part of parenthood before we took the plunge? Did we not realize that parenthood is a lifetime of responsibility with no clocking in or out? I believe we did. But who could have realized just how continuously challenging, difficult, trying and, in some cases, depression-inducing this job could be? (”Continuously” being the operative word.)
I don’t have a particular place where this lack of balance hits me the hardest. It’s in my face in every moment of every day. It’s something I’ve almost come to count on…kind of like death and taxes. This is the reality of my world. And with no family close by, there is no reprieve.
Am I so weak to think this such a challenge? Many women who have come before me did all this and more. And yet, I sometimes find myself considering going back to work just for the break! But then, I would miss it. Masochists, we Moms must be.
It will all balance out in the long run. But it’s a hell of a LONG run, these early years. And although I’m well aware that nothing good comes easy, it’s still the toughest job I’ll ever have. And failure is not an option.
So, in an effort to achieve some balance–however fleeting it may be–I vow to do something for myself this weekend. I’ll endeavor to schedule a long overdue pedicure with a childless girlfriend to help remind me of those carefree days of pre-Mommy-dom. (I just hope I will have something to say that isn’t kid related!) But I know that afterwards, I’ll be so happy to come home to my two little beasts who have already managed to enrich my life so drastically in the very short time they’ve been around.
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